OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Canoe Paddling Quality Assessment Using Smart Devices: Preliminary Machine Learning Study
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Over 22 million Americans participate in paddling-related activities annually, contributing to a global paddlesports market valued at 2.4 billion US dollars in 2020. Despite its popularity, the sport has seen limited integration of machine learning (ML) and remains hindered by the cost of coaching and specialized equipment. This study presents a novel AI-based coaching system that uses ML models trained on motion data and delivers stroke feedback via a large language model (LLM). Participants were recruited through a collaboration with the NYU Concrete Canoe Team. Motion data were collected across two sessions, one with suboptimal form and one with corrected technique, using Apple Watches and smartphones secured in sport straps. The data underwent stroke segmentation and feature extraction. ML models, including Support Vector Classifier, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, and Extremely Randomized Trees, were trained on both raw and engineered features. A web based interface was developed to visualize stroke quality and deliver LLM-based feedback. Across four participants, eight trials yielded 66 stroke samples. The Extremely Randomized Tree model achieved the highest performance with an F score of 0.9496 under five fold cross validation. The web interface successfully provided both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback. Sensor placement near the wrists improved data quality. Preliminary results indicate that smartwatches and smartphones can enable low cost, accessible alternatives to traditional paddling instruction. While limited by sample size, the study demonstrates the feasibility of using consumer devices and ML to support stroke refinement and technique improvement.
Unlocking Excellence: The Impact of Voucher Incentives on Cybersecurity Education
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2025
Year: 2025

While voucher incentives have been popular for primary and secondary schools, they are less used in higher education. In this study, we leverage industry voucher incentives to inspire students in cybersecurity education (CSE). We adopt a 100% portfolio-based assessment strategy, where students can freely select their target grades in the investigated unit. We purposely design one of the high distinction (HD) tasks to be obtaining an industry certificate and provide vouchers to those who can accomplish a predefined set of tasks before a midpoint. The voucher recipients will use the voucher to access the industry certificate training materials and sit the certificate exam for free. Passing the certificate exam is one of the conditions for gaining an HD grade. Our survey and interviews reveal a substantial influence of voucher incentives on students' career aspirations. In light of the findings, recommendations on adopting voucher incentives in CSE or broader ICT education are offered for institutions and researchers.
Prototype Learning to Create Refined Interpretable Digital Phenotypes from ECGs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Prototype-based neural networks offer interpretable predictions by comparing inputs to learned, representative signal patterns anchored in training data. While such models have shown promise in the classification of physiological data, it remains unclear whether their prototypes capture an underlying structure that aligns with broader clinical phenotypes. We use a prototype-based deep learning model trained for multi-label ECG classification using the PTB-XL dataset. Then without modification we performed inference on the MIMIC-IV clinical database. We assess whether individual prototypes, trained solely for classification, are associated with hospital discharge diagnoses in the form of phecodes in this external population. Individual prototypes demonstrate significantly stronger and more specific associations with clinical outcomes compared to the classifier's class predictions, NLP-extracted concepts, or broader prototype classes across all phecode categories. Prototype classes with mixed significance patterns exhibit significantly greater intra-class distances (p $<$ 0.0001), indicating the model learned to differentiate clinically meaningful variations within diagnostic categories. The prototypes achieve strong predictive performance across diverse conditions, with AUCs ranging from 0.89 for atrial fibrillation to 0.91 for heart failure, while also showing substantial signal for non-cardiac conditions such as sepsis and renal disease. These findings suggest that prototype-based models can support interpretable digital phenotyping from physiologic time-series data, providing transferable intermediate phenotypes that capture clinically meaningful physiologic signatures beyond their original training objectives.
Decentralized Aerial Manipulation of a Cable-Suspended Load using Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2025
Year: 2025

This paper presents the first decentralized method to enable real-world 6-DoF manipulation of a cable-suspended load using a team of Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). Our method leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train an outer-loop control policy for each MAV. Unlike state-of-the-art controllers that utilize a centralized scheme, our policy does not require global states, inter-MAV communications, nor neighboring MAV information. Instead, agents communicate implicitly through load pose observations alone, which enables high scalability and flexibility. It also significantly reduces computing costs during inference time, enabling onboard deployment of the policy. In addition, we introduce a new action space design for the MAVs using linear acceleration and body rates. This choice, combined with a robust low-level controller, enables reliable sim-to-real transfer despite significant uncertainties caused by cable tension during dynamic 3D motion. We validate our method in various real-world experiments, including full-pose control under load model uncertainties, showing setpoint tracking performance comparable to the state-of-the-art centralized method. We also demonstrate cooperation amongst agents with heterogeneous control policies, and robustness to the complete in-flight loss of one MAV. Videos of experiments: https://autonomousrobots.nl/paper_websites/aerial-manipulation-marl
MiraGe: Multimodal Discriminative Representation Learning for Generalizable AI-Generated Image Detection
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in generative models have highlighted the need for robust detectors capable of distinguishing real images from AI-generated images. While existing methods perform well on known generators, their performance often declines when tested with newly emerging or unseen generative models due to overlapping feature embeddings that hinder accurate cross-generator classification. In this paper, we propose Multimodal Discriminative Representation Learning for Generalizable AI-generated Image Detection (MiraGe), a method designed to learn generator-invariant features. Motivated by theoretical insights on intra-class variation minimization and inter-class separation, MiraGe tightly aligns features within the same class while maximizing separation between classes, enhancing feature discriminability. Moreover, we apply multimodal prompt learning to further refine these principles into CLIP, leveraging text embeddings as semantic anchors for effective discriminative representation learning, thereby improving generalizability. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that MiraGe achieves state-of-the-art performance, maintaining robustness even against unseen generators like Sora.
E-VRAG: Enhancing Long Video Understanding with Resource-Efficient Retrieval Augmented Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled substantial progress in video understanding by leveraging cross-modal reasoning capabilities. However, their effectiveness is limited by the restricted context window and the high computational cost required to process long videos with thousands of frames. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses this challenge by selecting only the most relevant frames as input, thereby reducing the computational burden. Nevertheless, existing video RAG methods struggle to balance retrieval efficiency and accuracy, particularly when handling diverse and complex video content. To address these limitations, we propose E-VRAG, a novel and efficient video RAG framework for video understanding. We first apply a frame pre-filtering method based on hierarchical query decomposition to eliminate irrelevant frames, reducing computational costs at the data level. We then employ a lightweight VLM for frame scoring, further reducing computational costs at the model level. Additionally, we propose a frame retrieval strategy that leverages the global statistical distribution of inter-frame scores to mitigate the potential performance degradation from using a lightweight VLM. Finally, we introduce a multi-view question answering scheme for the retrieved frames, enhancing the VLM's capability to extract and comprehend information from long video contexts. Experiments on four public benchmarks show that E-VRAG achieves about 70% reduction in computational cost and higher accuracy compared to baseline methods, all without additional training. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of E-VRAG in improving both efficiency and accuracy for video RAG tasks.
Are All Prompt Components Value-Neutral? Understanding the Heterogeneous Adversarial Robustness of Dissected Prompt in Large Language Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2025
Year: 2025

Prompt-based adversarial attacks have become an effective means to assess the robustness of large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often treat prompts as monolithic text, overlooking their structural heterogeneity-different prompt components contribute unequally to adversarial robustness. Prior works like PromptRobust assume prompts are value-neutral, but our analysis reveals that complex, domain-specific prompts with rich structures have components with differing vulnerabilities. To address this gap, we introduce PromptAnatomy, an automated framework that dissects prompts into functional components and generates diverse, interpretable adversarial examples by selectively perturbing each component using our proposed method, ComPerturb. To ensure linguistic plausibility and mitigate distribution shifts, we further incorporate a perplexity (PPL)-based filtering mechanism. As a complementary resource, we annotate four public instruction-tuning datasets using the PromptAnatomy framework, verified through human review. Extensive experiments across these datasets and five advanced LLMs demonstrate that ComPerturb achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates. Ablation studies validate the complementary benefits of prompt dissection and PPL filtering. Our results underscore the importance of prompt structure awareness and controlled perturbation for reliable adversarial robustness evaluation in LLMs. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Yujiaaaaa/PACP.
EvoVLMA: Evolutionary Vision-Language Model Adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been exploited in various Computer Vision tasks (e.g., few-shot recognition) via model adaptation, such as prompt tuning and adapters. However, existing adaptation methods are designed by human experts, requiring significant time cost and experience. Inspired by recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) based code generation, we propose an Evolutionary Vision-Language Model Adaptation (EvoVLMA) method to automatically search training-free efficient adaptation algorithms for VLMs. We recognize feature selection and logits computation as the key functions in training-free VLM adaptation, and propose a two-stage LLM-assisted evolutionary algorithm for optimizing these parts in a sequential manner, effectively addressing the challenge posed by the expansive search space through a divide-and-conquer strategy. Besides, to enhance the stability and efficiency of searching process, we propose low-precision code conversion, web based code execution and process monitoring, leading to a highly effective automatic algorithm design system. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the algorithms found by EvoVLMA can obtain promising results compared to previous manually-designed ones. More specifically, in the 8-shot image classification setting, the classical APE algorithm can be improved by 1.91 points in recognition accuracy. This research opens new possibilities for automating the optimization of adaptation algorithms of pre-trained multimodal models. Code is available at: https://github.com/kding1225/EvoVLMA
TopoImages: Incorporating Local Topology Encoding into Deep Learning Models for Medical Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

Topological structures in image data, such as connected components and loops, play a crucial role in understanding image content (e.g., biomedical objects). % Despite remarkable successes of numerous image processing methods that rely on appearance information, these methods often lack sensitivity to topological structures when used in general deep learning (DL) frameworks. % In this paper, we introduce a new general approach, called TopoImages (for Topology Images), which computes a new representation of input images by encoding local topology of patches. % In TopoImages, we leverage persistent homology (PH) to encode geometric and topological features inherent in image patches. % Our main objective is to capture topological information in local patches of an input image into a vectorized form. % Specifically, we first compute persistence diagrams (PDs) of the patches, % and then vectorize and arrange these PDs into long vectors for pixels of the patches. % The resulting multi-channel image-form representation is called a TopoImage. % TopoImages offers a new perspective for data analysis. % To garner diverse and significant topological features in image data and ensure a more comprehensive and enriched representation, we further generate multiple TopoImages of the input image using various filtration functions, which we call multi-view TopoImages. % The multi-view TopoImages are fused with the input image for DL-based classification, with considerable improvement. % Our TopoImages approach is highly versatile and can be seamlessly integrated into common DL frameworks. Experiments on three public medical image classification datasets demonstrate noticeably improved accuracy over state-of-the-art methods.
Set Pivot Learning: Redefining Generalized Segmentation with Vision Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2025
Year: 2025

In this paper, we introduce, for the first time, the concept of Set Pivot Learning, a paradigm shift that redefines domain generalization (DG) based on Vision Foundation Models (VFMs). Traditional DG assumes that the target domain is inaccessible during training, but the emergence of VFMs, trained on vast and diverse data, renders this assumption unclear and obsolete. Traditional DG assumes that the target domain is inaccessible during training, but the emergence of VFMs, which are trained on vast and diverse datasets, renders this assumption unclear and obsolete. To address this challenge, we propose Set Pivot Learning (SPL), a new definition of domain migration task based on VFMs, which is more suitable for current research and application requirements. Unlike conventional DG methods, SPL prioritizes adaptive refinement over rigid domain transfer, ensuring continuous alignment with evolving real-world conditions. Specifically, SPL features two key attributes: (i) Dynamic adaptation, transitioning from static domain alignment to flexible, task-driven feature optimization, enabling models to evolve with downstream scenarios; (ii) VFM-centric tuning, leveraging pretrained knowledge as a pivot to hone task-specific representations while preserving cross-domain robustness. Building on SPL, we propose a Dynamic Prompt Fine-Tuning method, which combines a Dynamic Class-aware Prompter with a Prompt-guided Feature Focuser, to elevate VFM performance in targeted scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method, highlighting its superiority over state-of-the-art methods, particularly in generalized segmentation.
Censored Sampling for Topology Design: Guiding Diffusion with Human Preferences
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Recent advances in denoising diffusion models have enabled rapid generation of optimized structures for topology optimization. However, these models often rely on surrogate predictors to enforce physical constraints, which may fail to capture subtle yet critical design flaws such as floating components or boundary discontinuities that are obvious to human experts. In this work, we propose a novel human-in-the-loop diffusion framework that steers the generative process using a lightweight reward model trained on minimal human feedback. Inspired by preference alignment techniques in generative modeling, our method learns to suppress unrealistic outputs by modulating the reverse diffusion trajectory using gradients of human-aligned rewards. Specifically, we collect binary human evaluations of generated topologies and train classifiers to detect floating material and boundary violations. These reward models are then integrated into the sampling loop of a pre-trained diffusion generator, guiding it to produce designs that are not only structurally performant but also physically plausible and manufacturable. Our approach is modular and requires no retraining of the diffusion model. Preliminary results show substantial reductions in failure modes and improved design realism across diverse test conditions. This work bridges the gap between automated design generation and expert judgment, offering a scalable solution to trustworthy generative design.
Practical, Generalizable and Robust Backdoor Attacks on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2025
Year: 2025

Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I DMs) have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality and diverse images from text prompts, yet recent studies have revealed their vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Existing attack methods suffer from critical limitations: 1) they rely on unnatural adversarial prompts that lack human readability and require massive poisoned data; 2) their effectiveness is typically restricted to specific models, lacking generalizability; and 3) they can be mitigated by recent backdoor defenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel backdoor attack framework that achieves three key properties: 1) \emph{Practicality}: Our attack requires only a few stealthy backdoor samples to generate arbitrary attacker-chosen target images, as well as ensuring high-quality image generation in benign scenarios. 2) \emph{Generalizability:} The attack is applicable across multiple T2I DMs without requiring model-specific redesign. 3) \emph{Robustness:} The attack remains effective against existing backdoor defenses and adaptive defenses. Our extensive experimental results on multiple T2I DMs demonstrate that with only 10 carefully crafted backdoored samples, our attack method achieves $>$90\% attack success rate with negligible degradation in benign image generation quality. We also conduct human evaluation to validate our attack effectiveness. Furthermore, recent backdoor detection and mitigation methods, as well as adaptive defense tailored to our attack are not sufficiently effective, highlighting the pressing need for more robust defense mechanisms against the proposed attack.
Augmented Reinforcement Learning Framework For Enhancing Decision-Making In Machine Learning Models Using External Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

This work proposes a novel technique Augmented Reinforcement Learning framework for the improvement of decision-making capabilities of machine learning models. The introduction of agents as external overseers checks on model decisions. The external agent can be anyone, like humans or automated scripts, that helps in decision path correction. It seeks to ascertain the priority of the "Garbage-In, Garbage-Out" problem that caused poor data inputs or incorrect actions in reinforcement learning. The ARL framework incorporates two external agents that aid in course correction and the guarantee of quality data at all points of the training cycle. The External Agent 1 is a real-time evaluator, which will provide feedback light of decisions taken by the model, identify suboptimal actions forming the Rejected Data Pipeline. The External Agent 2 helps in selective curation of the provided feedback with relevance and accuracy in business scenarios creates an approved dataset for future training cycles. The validation of the framework is also applied to a real-world scenario, which is "Document Identification and Information Extraction". This problem originates mainly from banking systems, but can be extended anywhere. The method of classification and extraction of information has to be done correctly here. Experimental results show that including human feedback significantly enhances the ability of the model in order to increase robustness and accuracy in making decisions. The augmented approach, with a combination of machine efficiency and human insight, attains a higher learning standard-mainly in complex or ambiguous environments. The findings of this study show that human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning frameworks such as ARL can provide a scalable approach to improving model performance in data-driven applications.
Learning Unified System Representations for Microservice Tail Latency Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2025
Year: 2025

Microservice architectures have become the de facto standard for building scalable cloud-native applications, yet their distributed nature introduces significant challenges in performance monitoring and resource management. Traditional approaches often rely on per-request latency metrics, which are highly sensitive to transient noise and fail to reflect the holistic behavior of complex, concurrent workloads. In contrast, window-level P95 tail latency provides a stable and meaningful signal that captures both system-wide trends and user-perceived performance degradation. We identify two key shortcomings in existing methods: (i) inadequate handling of heterogeneous data, where traffic-side features propagate across service dependencies and resource-side signals reflect localized bottlenecks, and (ii) the lack of principled architectural designs that effectively distinguish and integrate these complementary modalities. To address these challenges, we propose USRFNet, a deep learning network that explicitly separates and models traffic-side and resource-side features. USRFNet employs GNNs to capture service interactions and request propagation patterns, while gMLP modules independently model cluster resource dynamics. These representations are then fused into a unified system embedding to predict window-level P95 latency with high accuracy. We evaluate USRFNet on real-world microservice benchmarks under large-scale stress testing conditions, demonstrating substantial improvements in prediction accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines.